How to Add a Favicon to Your WordPress Blog

Favicon or Site Icon is the tiny image that appear next to your website title in the browser. It helps your users identify your website and more frequent visitors of your site will build an instant recognition for that tiny image. This increases your brand recognition and helps you build trust among your audiences. In our article about most common WordPress mistakes, not adding a favicon was among the top 25. In this article, we will show you how to add a favicon to your WordPress blog.

Why you should Add a Favicon to Your WordPress Site?

As we mentioned earlier that it establishes your website’s identity. However, it also improves your site’s usability and user experience. This image will help you understand it better:

Most users usually have many tabs open in their browser window. This hides your website’s title as the number of tabs increase. The favicon helps user identify your website and quickly switch to the tab they want.

You can ask your users to add your site to their homescreen on mobile devices. Your site icon or favicon is also used when a user adds your site to their homescreen on a mobile device.

How to Create a Favicon

You can use your brand’s logo as your site icon or favicon. The recommended size for your site icon image is at least 512 pixels in both width and height. The site icon image should be a square, you can use a larger rectangular image and WordPress will allow you to crop the image when you add it.

We recommend using an image editing program like Adobe Photoshop or Gimp to create a site icon of exactly 512×512 pixels. This way you can maintain exact proportions for your image. You can use transparent image or fill the image with a background color of your choice. This image could be in png, jpeg, or gif format.

Video Tutorial

Subscribe to WPBeginner

If you don’t like the video or need more instructions, then continue reading.

Adding Your Site Icon or Favicon in WordPress

Since WordPress 4.3, you can add a favicon or site icon from WordPress admin area. Simply go to Appearance » Customize and click on the ‘Site Identity’ tab.

The site identity section in customizer allows you to change the site title, description, and control whether or not you want to display them in the header. It also allows you to upload your site icon. Simply click on the select file button and then upload the image you want to use as site icon.

If the image you are uploading exceeds recommended size, then WordPress will allow you to crop it. If it matches the recommended size exactly, then you can just save your changes.

That’s all you can now preview your site and see your favicon in action. You can also visit your site on a mobile device and then from the browser menu select “Add to homescreen’. You will notice that your site icon will appear on the homescreen.

Adding Favicon to Older WordPress (4.2 or below)

Upload your favicon to your website’s root directory using FTP. After that you can simply paste this code into your theme’s header.php file.

Replace wpbeginner.com with your site’s URL and you are good to go. If your theme does not have a header.php file, or you can not find it, then don’t worry we have a plugin for you. Install and activate Insert Headers and Footers plugin. After activating the plugin go to Settings » Insert Headers and Footers and paste the code provided above in the header section and save your settings.

If you don’t want to deal with FTP at all, then you can also use the plugin called All in One Favicon.

We hope that this article helped you add favicon to your WordPress site. For questions and feedback you can leave a comment below or catch us on Twitter.

91 Comments

Why does it need to be 512 pixels for an icon? I’m hoping it’s converted somewhere inside WordPress, once and done, and not on every load. 512×512 is crazy for something that would very rarely be bigger than 32X32, unless I am missing something?

I should add that the new, cropped image is exactly the same dimensions as the original I uploaded, but now I have two in my library (albeit one has been processed twice, and has actually increased two kilobytes in file size!).

I have gone through the directory, exactly as you described, but my Site Identity tab only has “Site Title”, “Tagline”, and a checkbox for displaying header text. How can I fix that? Or do I have to go the FTP route?

I am so glad to have stumbled upon your article. I had quit trying to figure out how to upload my favicon in the past because it felt impossible. But recently, I felt the need to take another stab at it. You made it so easy! I can’t recall it being this easy to upload before.

I have a question, recently, I’ve used the plugin All in One Favicon. I uploaded my picture but it doesn’t show up if I’m not logged into WordPress, it just keeps on showing the HostGator favicon (regular), can anyone help?

I have a logo which I want to use. Is that possible? It is not in a square format at this point, but can be. How do I do that? Can I “create” one in iPhoto (on a Mac)? Where would I do that in iPhoto, and how? I have one on my dashboard now. Can I drag that somewhere? How do I save it as a PNG file? Where do I do that?

This is a nice general site to understand what a favicon is, but not on how to do it.

Hi Bert, I’m still feeling my way around this process myself but I am ok up to the point you are trying to reach. Creating your own or editing an existing logo to make it fit can be done in a program like Photoshop. Remember to go to New file, and set the size to 16×16 pixels. Import your image to this and reduce it to fit. If you don’t have Photoshop or any other image editing software you can go to where the instructions are easy to follow. I’m sure it doesn’t necessarily have to be a PNG file. But it does have to be an .icon which the Favicon site will convert for you from the original .jpeg you uploaded. Because I have Photoshop when I clicked on the Edit button in iPhoto it automatically opened Photoshop. See what it does when you do it on your system. It may open an alternative editing method. Hope that helps. I know what it’s like as a beginner.

I managed to add the favicon without the background image. But when I move to another tab on the browser, the background image shows up. For example- if you look up the favicon is perfect. But, when you are on another tab, you will the white background show up. Any advice would be highly appreciated! Thank you!

Yes, this how I did that in bluehost. I’ve just overwrite the favicon.ico that was there with my image uploaded. The only thing is that the original was set at 16×16 and I had to add a similar 16×16. It didn’t take a 32×32 though but it’s fine, it worked easily.

Thanks for choosing to leave a comment. Please keep in mind that all comments are moderated according to our comment policy, and your email address will NOT be published. Please Do NOT use keywords in the name field. Let's have a personal and meaningful conversation.

Notify me of followup comments via e-mail. You can also subscribe without commenting.

WPBeginner is a free WordPress resource site for Beginners. WPBeginner was founded in July 2009 by Syed Balkhi. The main goal of this site is to provide quality tips, tricks, hacks, and other WordPress resources that allows WordPress beginners to improve their site(s).